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Mobile & Video Advertising BlogThu, 05 Sep 2019 06:11:58 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.66 Ad Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an Ecommerce Businesshttps://www.mobileads.com/blog/6-ad-mistakes-to-avoid-when-starting-an-ecommerce-business
https://www.mobileads.com/blog/6-ad-mistakes-to-avoid-when-starting-an-ecommerce-business#respondThu, 05 Sep 2019 03:18:09 +0000https://www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=2426One of the most difficult parts about starting any business is the marketing side. Starting out, you’re likely to be overwhelmed with potential tips, tricks, and ideas coming from all over. One minute you’ll hear people stressing Instagram while others may warn you about relying too much on influencers. It’s also tough to start out […]

]]>One of the most difficult parts about starting any business is the marketing side. Starting out, you’re likely to be overwhelmed with potential tips, tricks, and ideas coming from all over. One minute you’ll hear people stressing Instagram while others may warn you about relying too much on influencers.

It’s also tough to start out because you lack one crucial component: data. You simply don’t have a ton of data when you’re starting your business. Although you may have a target demographic, that may be slightly altered over time. You don’t know when or how people are buying. You don’t know what they’re thinking about their products. It’s hard to market and make ads but over time, it will become more clear. While the list of tips and tricks may be endless, there are some blanket mistakes you’re going to want to avoid as you get your ad campaigns underway.

Making Your Ads a One-Size-Fits All

Similar to tailoring your resume, you’re going to have to tailor your ads accordingly. Breaking down one of the most basic differences on one of the largest platforms, take a look at the number of male vs. female users on social media.

As you can see, “social media is a woman’s world”. Reddit can hardly be counted as a social media platform, since the website touts anonymity as one of its calling cards.

Tailoring your ads to vary across different platforms is just part of the process, the other side is technical.

Making a video ad for all platforms without properly optimizing it means you could run into various errors. Making an ad for mobile platforms should look a bit different than making an ad for desktops.

Relying on One Single Ad

Think of some of the most successful ad campaigns: the gecko from Geico, the cows from Chick-Fil-A, or the toads from Budweiser. You can’t just rely on one single ad to tell your whole story.

Now, this doesn’t have to be something like the gecko or cows, but you should make your ads follow the same path. If you have ten points you want to get across in your ads, make 10 different ads. You want to add some diversity to your ads.

Think about it like leaving breadcrumbs for potential consumers to gobble up as they eventually reach your product.

Not Optimizing Your Website

All your ads are going to be aimed at bringing people to your website. One of the worst things
that can happen is for your website to be slow or confusing.

Almost 80% of customers who experience issues with a website decide not to buy from the website and it makes sense. If you’re having trouble arriving to the homepage, why should you stick around and go through slow steps to find the product you want?

Make sure your website is fast and streamlined for consumers. You want to be sure the entire process is as easy and painless as humanly possible. First impressions matter, even in the digital world!

Relying on Promotions

While running promotions is a fantastic idea, it’s not good enough to solely rely on promotions to bring people in. Promotions are like jokes at a big speech. They’re good enough to bring people in to listen to you, but only telling jokes at your speech is a way to make people’s attention spans fly out the window.

Don’t run your ads on promotions, lest risk the idea of your business being seen as a temporary stop-gap. People will see your business as a short-term option instead of a long-term solution.

Not Tracking Ad Success

With ads, many may think that once you’ve finished and published the ads that you’re finished. Unfortunately, you need to be following and tracking your ads, watching the analytics closely. One great tool for this is Google Analytics, a free tool which can help you follow the success of your campaigns and pages.

You want to make sure you have a high ROI, or return on investment, to see which ad campaigns are working the best and which you should be investing in more.

Not Testing Your Ads

Before you make a website, a domain name must be purchased. When you’re thinking of the name, you probably ran it with your coworkers and others to see how they liked the name. That was a form of testing the waters and the market.

You should also be testing your ads in order to make sure they display properly, you can track their status, and much more.

You can use your tested ads to reach out to new audiences and how large potential audiences are. You can test your ads by gender, age, location, and plenty of other settings.

Aiming Solely for New Customers

One of the best ways to build your business is by establishing relationships with existing customers to make sure they come back. Trying to convince a potential customer to buy something is much harder than making a new customer come back. Not only is it much harder, it’s also much more expensive.

Existing customers will be your lifeblood, not just because of their more frequent purchases. Instead of investing a ton in trying to find new customers, invest more in retargeting customers. Reward them for being loyal and do what you can to make sure they stay that way.

One simple way you can retarget them is by adding their information directly to an email list. Be sure to connect with them about new deals, promotions, sales, and anything else that might seem relevant.

Not only are existing customers more likely to return, they’re also more likely to tell others about
your services. Remember, word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly powerful even if your business
is entirely online.

]]>https://www.mobileads.com/blog/6-ad-mistakes-to-avoid-when-starting-an-ecommerce-business/feed0What is Mobile Advertising and How Does it Work?https://www.mobileads.com/blog/mobile-advertising
https://www.mobileads.com/blog/mobile-advertising#respondTue, 03 Sep 2019 06:31:36 +0000https://www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=2403In a consumer world that’s always online, a good advertising campaign definitely needs to focus on its mobile phone using audience. However, mobile advertising is a completely new field that differs a lot from the traditional concepts of ad making.
Present-day marketers use a wide range of sophisticated options to create user-friendly mobile ads to boost a brand name and generate higher revenues.
The article here answers all your questions regarding mobile advertising, its benefits, different types, steps involved in designing a successful campaign, strategies and the costs involved.

In a consumer world that’s always online, a good advertising campaign definitely needs to focus on its mobile phone using audience. However, mobile advertising is a completely new field that differs a lot from the traditional concepts of ad making.

Present-day marketers use a wide range of sophisticated options to create user-friendly mobile ads to boost a brand name and generate higher revenues.

The article here answers all your questions regarding mobile advertising, its benefits, different types, steps involved in designing a successful campaign, strategies and the costs involved.

About Mobile Advertising and its Benefits

Mobile ads are the advertising world’s answer to a consumer world that is hooked on to their phone screens or mobile gadgets. In layman terms, it is the type of product/services advertisement technique that you see on your smartphones.

Mobile phone advertising can occur as text-based ads, banner advertisements, videos or even as mobile games.

Considering the average screen size of mobiles, the advertisements are optimized to fit into a smaller display area.

Mobile advertising is essentially a part of mobile marketing using traditional techniques and strategies to collect data. This may include consumer profiles, demographics, habits, preferences, etc.

So instead of going out and reaching your markets on the physical level (posters, banners), mobile advertising makes use of the popularity of smartphone devices.

The invention of mobile advertising has been revolutionary when it comes to marketing campaigns. Its reported benefits include a surge in customer engagement rates, cost-effectiveness, personalized consumer relationships, and social media friendliness.

In a world that has more number of mobile subscriptions than the human population, it would be ridiculous not to base your marketing game around it!

Current mobile advertising trends

Seeing an online promotional advertisement pop up while you’re using an online app is a common occurrence. Consumers expect these and their responses to the advertisements are growing in numbers.

Interactive Advertising Bureau states that mobile advertising has experienced a growth surge of 65% in 2014, which has since been growing by the day.

A report sourced from emarketer says “In 2019, worldwide digital ad spending will rise by 17.6% to $333.25 billion. That means that, for the first time, digital will account for roughly half of the global ad market.”

Another IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, 2018 for the US states that “Mobiles contribute the maximum to the digital marketing’s steady growth and account for approximately two-thirds (65%) of 2018’s internet ad revenues. Mobile advertising revenue grew up to 40% from 2017 to 2018.”

Similarly, according to this article on Ad Age, “digital advertising had yet another record-breaking year in 2017, as ad revenue totaled $88 billion, a 21 percent upswing from 2016”.

Mobile advertising basics- Things you need to know

So what are the basics that you need to know before you step into the amazing, yet ever-changing world of mobile advertising?

Here’s a list of some basics that you need to learn:

The terminologies used:

programmatic advertising is the new trend in the world of advertising. Everything is changing to digital. Following are some key terms being used:

Demand Side Platform (DSP): It is also known as “buy-side optimizer” or “buy-side platform”. DSP is a digital standard that works for centralized and aggregated media buying from multiple sources. This also includes real-time bidding capabilities of all sources.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB): This method is specifically used for buying and selling ad inventories that are present in real-time (live).

Ad exchange: These are the sales channels for purchasing and selling online media advertising inventories. This is the modern version of the traditional manual price negotiation techniques used for bidding.

Ad network: This refers to the organizations that outsource sales services for publishers. Their key tasks include sifting through the ad inventories from various sources and generate buying opportunities for advertisers.

Supply Side Platform (SSP): These are exchange places for publishers who want to sell their ad inventory to advertisers. They are also commonly referred to as “sell-side optimizer”, inventory aggregator” or “yield optimizer”.

Agency Trading Desk (ATD): As the name suggests, this refers to a department of the advertising agency that facilitates the ad inventory purchases by the clients.

The mobile platforms used:

Understanding the mobile platforms that can be used to target your ads is a crucial aspect. Following are the two types of mobile platforms being used:

Mobile Web: This refers to the pages that are arranged to fit the mobile screen sizes (both smartphones and tablets). Since more users prefer to access their mobile devices rather than desktops, it is easier to reach a higher number of target audience. Modern ad contents like video ads and other rich media versions help in offering enhanced ad experience.

In- App: Apps are easy to download and navigate and are highly preferred by present-day mobile users. In-App advertisements are those that are visible within these apps. These are specifically designed to target user behavior and preferences and to give them the best browsing experience.

Ad formats (as discussed in the subsequent sections) rely on the platform being chosen.

The currency terminology being used:

Mobile ad campaign payments can be made using several different ways. These include:

Pay Per Click(PPC)- Also known as Cost per Click (CPC) in some countries. In simple terms, payments are made based on the number of times the ad is clicked.

Cost per Impression (CPI)-Payments are made for every new ad view.

Cost per Action (CPA)- Payments are made for every completed action.

Cost per View (CPV)- Payments are made every time an advertisement pop up.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)- refers to the number of clicks on a particular link.

Cost per Mile (CPM)- Payments for every thousand ad views.

Conversion Rate (CR)- Percentage of users taking the desired action

Install Rate (IR)- Percentage of users installing an app.

Advantages of mobile advertising

What makes mobile advertising so effective?

Markets are constantly expanding. New business ventures and entrepreneurs are looking for options to leverage this amazing opportunity. Following are some of the key benefits of mobile advertising:

Accessible: Social media platforms and mobile apps have become the modern terminology for communication. People spend a considerable amount of time updating their apps. It is hence important to deliver your campaign directly to your consumers.And what better way to do so than to reach out to your consumers on their cell phones. The accessibility benefits of mobile advertising ensure that that your ad campaigns get delivered instantly and accessed easily by the users.

Geo-targeting: Since people keep their cell phones with them when they travel, marketers and advertisers can make use of the knowledge to deliver location-based, geo-targeted advertisements. Location-based mobile advertising is a great way to analyze consumer preferences and habits like shopping favorites, areas frequented, etc. For example, when a shopper visiting X locality gets an advertisement of a sale happening in a store there, the chances of visiting the store are likely to increase.

Understanding consumer habits: Mobile devices have a unique ID. Using the id’s, offline as well as online habits of the target consumers can easily be studied. This, in turn, helps in devising a sound marketing campaign.

Cost efficiency: Mobile advertising is one of the most cost-efficient ways to reach your target customers. In fact, the overall cost of designing a mobile advertising campaign is a small fraction of a TV or radio ad. Being budget-friendly means that marketers can afford to increase the frequency of sending messages or even target new customers repeatedly.

Personalized advertising: Mobile advertisements have the unique advantage of tailoring the mobile user’s preference in marketing campaigns. Customers have the option to follow, like or even send in their own suggestions to their favorite brands through social platforms.

Plethora of creative options: Since mobile advertising integrates well with social media channels, websites, and apps, it is possible to enhance the creativity levels of the advertisements. With a strong visual appeal and instant outreach, mobile ads ensure a stronger impression on the target audience.

Fraud resistance: Compared to desktop advertising, fraud detection is easy with mobile devices. It is easy to verify the “Click to calls” and usage.

Instant results: Cell phone users keep their devices with them wherever they go. The chances of seeing an ad on a mobile set are more as compared to desktop or other traditional advertising methods. Additionally, it is also easy to track user responses instantly.

Interactive: People like to take part in advertisements that come along with contests, games, etc. The use of gamification and other features makes mobile advertising more interactive.

Types of Mobile Advertising

Mobile ads can have different forms and platforms. While marketers use each of the below-mentioned mobile advertising solutions, the suitability to a sector and the baseline strategy decides the choice. Various social media platforms work differently when it comes to mobile advertising techniques and efforts.

What follows is to consider the different types of mobile advertising options available and consider them with respect to the goal of the advertisement.

1. Banner advertising

Banner ads are the oldest version of mobile ads. The origin of banner advertising can be traced back to web marketing. However, in a world that is more in love with interactive rich media ads, banner advertisements still manage to survive and be popular.

Banner ads are often seen embedded in a web host page or an app. In most instances, these are depicted by images (or graphics with text) that are designed to grab the attention of consumers. The idea is to pull the customers from the host page to the advertiser’s page and later convert it into a paying client.

The use of vibrant colors, quality graphics, and “Call to Action” tabs make banner ads very appealing and popular. The better the visual appeal, the higher is the customer reaction.

While banner ads are very cost-efficient and are still being widely used, the world is quickly moving to other modern options like gamification ads and video ads (described below).

That said, banner ads are very much alive and in demand.

2. Video advertising

A report from the Business Insider says that social video advertising spend doubled up in 2017 (expectedly) to over $4 billion.

Those FIGURES alone say a lot!

Video advertising is a very powerful communication tool to get a company it’s desired conversion figures.

Product videos are extremely helpful for customers when they are in a decision-making process. Videos can effectively deliver a complete visual experience, which helps the users to get a closer feel of the products in question

A big percentage of consumers watch videos on their mobile phones. In fact, watching video on a phone has more impact and gets more conversions as compared to watching video ads on TV!

Ad makers and marketers use various techniques to display video ads on a mobile device. Options like optimizing a YouTube ad, Shopping ads that get displayed underneath the main video, sponsored advertisements that come at the beginning of video content are used.

Some important tips for creating mobile video advertisements that generate good ROI are:

Keep it SIMPLE

Use your CREATIVITY

Keep it short and CRISP

The audio and visuals are NOT TOO LOUD

Display a CALL TO ACTION

3. Full-screen or interstitial mobile advertising

Interstitial advertisements are the full-screen videos or graphics that are usually placed at app transition points.

Say, for example, you are playing a video game. You’ve just managed to clear Level 1 and are ready to get your next game level loaded. That’s when you observe an image or a short video ad coming up. These are interstitial mobile ads.

Interstitial mobile ads

Interstitial ads get high click percentages compared to banner ads. However, the rule that goes with interstitial ads is to display them ONLY at the interval points. The ads appear naturally between the content transition points so as not to interrupt the user activity flow.

Ad types may include text, graphics or rich media. Finally, users usually get a choice of closing the advertisement by clicking the X button (usually on the top right).

Since these ads take up the full screen or the majority of the screen space, they work well to grab consumer attention.

4. Native app-based advertising

Native ads are similar to the banners but are not conveyed directly, so as to be treated as advertisement content. The ads are displayed within the app’s natural environment of the mobile and hence blend in with the flow.

Since they’re embedded as a part of the mobile environment, they offer an advantage. They can not be blocked.

So, you get your advertisement displayed to targeted users without actually causing forced interruptions. The appearance, buttons, and design features are similar to other elements of the app.

Some key tips for creating high quality native mobile ads include adding the following key ingredients:

Headline

Crisp description

Brand logo or name

URL

A popular example of native mobile advertising is Facebook ads. Users scroll through their page/news feed and yet get to see ads embedded in between two news pieces.

5. Gamified mobile advertising

Gamified options are a type of interactive video or rich media advertisements. These are a favorite with savvy marketers who want to create interactive channels to advertise.

Games are a natural way to generate user interest. Gaming mobile advertisements work great when marketing apps. For example, if the app is about problem-solving or finding directions on a map, short and quick gaming videos that let the users do test it works great as an advertisement.

Gaming mobile advertising is a great way to engage customers at a basic level. These also work well to generate user data like consumer profiles, etc. Additionally, gamification based ads create high conversion rates since they manage to capture user attention.

A potential consumer involved in a challenging game is more likely to spend 10 or more seconds on the advertisement.

Key Steps for Developing a Mobile Advertising Campaign

An online mobile marketing campaign uses a certain set of key elements. Following is a list of factors that add up to create a successful mobile advertising campaign :

1. Establish the objectives

Like any other marketing campaign, it is important to define objectives for the mobile advertising campaign as a first step. Defining objectives or measurable goals helps you understand your results and take valuable lessons from them.

A mobile advertising campaign is created in the first place to raise awareness about the brand and increase sales numbers. It also helps drive the web traffic to the company’s landing page. A good number of companies create specific mobile advertisements to promote a special deal or a newly launched product.

Irrespective of the objective, getting clarity on the goals helps in defining the metrics that are required to achieve the targets.

Some examples of objectives for a mobile advertising campaign could be:

Raise brand awareness

Generate “x” number of registrations

Get “x” number of mobile opt-ins

Get web traffic to the landing site

Getting “x” number of people for video gameplay

Increase sales to “x” figure

Add a targeted number of new clients per month

Advertise a promotional offer

2. Choosing your target audience

Adding more contacts or clients is one of the key reasons to start a mobile promotion event in the first place.

But just adding up the audience is not enough. You want to target a specific group of audience to be on top of your advertising game. It all starts with identifying who you want to target.

Once the target audience is identified, it is important to study their preferences and other details like what they need, what they prefer, how they react, etc.

Identifying the target demographic areas can be done through telephonic surveys, text messages, and social media.

Most consumers react better to mobile advertisements that are customized for their locality. Targeting localized customers helps generate better conversions.

Studying a target group of potential consumers also helps to understand their mobile environments.

It is crucial to factor the viewing mindset of users.

They typically have smaller screen sizes than conventional desktops, and hence need better clarity with the texts, visuals, and graphics. Also, remember that mobile users usually have shorter attention spans. The advertisements should hence be sufficiently catchy to grab their attention.

Various online tools like Google Analytics can be used to gather target audience profiles.

3. Identifying the type of mobile ad you need

Determining the type of ad campaign that is best suited for your product or services needs careful considerations. Ad campaigns could be created to simply generate higher sales or with the sole purpose of creating brand awareness.

As mentioned in the earlier sections of the article, various types of mobile advertising formats are used by marketers. A campaign could be more suited to video ads or could work well with photo advertisements or banner ads.

If you’re looking at generating a higher number of clicks, a regular banner advertisement can be used. When the target is to get high sales figures, creating a Video or YouTube-based ad that comes with a CTA link works well. Ensure that the CTA link directs consumers to the landing page that talks about your product.

Native ads work great when you need to promote an app-based product. A user when viewing the ad in the middle of their mobile activity will automatically get excited about installing the ad (of course, the services provided by the app should be fairly attractive).

Various other mobile-based games or apps that offer a video game prefer to use a gamification based mobile advertisement. As mentioned earlier, gamification ads create a high level of excitability and engagement amongst the users.

While it is true that some mobile advertising formats utilize lesser resources than others, it is important to consider the purpose and the target audience when choosing a type. Video ads, for example, are costly to create but deliver higher lead generation and stronger brand awareness.

4. Decide the ad campaign length

Figuring out the type of mobile ad campaign that you want to run and the numbers that you’re looking to generate is the first step. Once you’ve done that, it boils down to planning the actual campaign.

Start with planning out the length of your ad campaign. This again depends on factors like:

Types of actions that the users will need to take (single click, multiple steps, etc)

User group preferences as observed from previously generated data.

Budget availability

If a single click directs your user straight to the landing page for purchase, your mobile ad length will obviously be short. On the other hand, a campaign that targets both brand awareness and sales generation will need to run through multiple steps and will hence be lengthy.

The length of the mobile ad campaign is also a factor that contributes to the overall cost, resources and time.

5. Consider the targeted devices

Ad content varies based on the devices that are targeted. Different types of contents are used for different devices.

Smartphones usually have small screen sizes and need more focused content with minimal interruptions. Tablets and iPads, on the other hand, require high-quality creatives.

Understanding the device preference of your target customers is hence important. We actually keep coming back to the realization that understanding your user groups is extremely crucial.

Even within a device, the time spent by a user on apps or mobile web needs to be considered. Preferences differ based on region and country.

6. Ad designing

It finally comes down to designing the mobile advertisement, complete with graphics and content.

General guidelines to keep in mind while creating a mobile ad are available all over the internet. However, it is important to remember that mobile advertisements are created with the primary objective of getting the viewer’s attention.

Focus on using high-quality graphics, especially when the ads are being created for iPad and tablets. Remember that viewers using a slightly larger screen expect better quality visuals than those who view the ads on their cell phones.

It pays to spend time and resources on high-quality graphics when considering certain ad types like banner ads and interstitial ads.

When it comes to mobile advertisements, content works like nothing else. Design alone may not do the job.

Make sure that your content copy is compelling enough to persuade consumers to buy your products. Ad content needs to be crisp and clear about the product/service along with an attention-grabbing call to action tabs.

If you can keep your content engaging and interactive, even better.

Ensure that the number of touchpoints is kept minimal. A user may not like the idea of devoting too much time and attention to complete the CTA after seeing the ad. Keeping them away from their mobile work for too long can create negative reviews.

Finally, as mentioned earlier in the article, keep your focus limited to a targeted set of audience. Let your users get a sense that the mobile advertisement understands their needs and is created for them. User data like demographics, location, behavior pattern, shopping choices, social media preferences can help creating user-targeted ads.

7. Data management, reporting, and analysis

Gathering user information is easy. However, it is crucial to respect the privacy of your users and consider the safety of their data. Managing the data that is collected during mobile promotions is important.

The database collected during mobile campaigns is huge. It is much more than what you can capture through online desktop promotions. Consider the following points for effective data management:

What is the type of user data available with you?

Owner information (it is advisable that you take ownership of the data from your technology provider)

How will the mobile audience be segmented?

How are the tracking links set up?

Reporting and analysis are again an important aspect of a mobile advertising campaign. it includes scrutinizing the following:

User funnels and the goals that you want your consumers to follow

User behavioral patterns

User’s engagement time

User visit frequency

Campaign’s overall contribution to the overall objective

8. Ad testing

So your ad is prepared and you’re ready to launch?

Now is the time to test the conversion rates. Measurements and metrics can be collected for a small period, like a month to see how the mobile ad is performing. An assessment at this stage will tell you how the advertisement is performing in terms of conversions and sales.

Mobile campaigns are usually tracked using two key attribution methodologies:

Unique Identified matching

Device Fingerprinting

Once you have some preliminary measurements, you can take time to improve your mobile ad.

Key Mobile Ad Strategies That Work

As mentioned earlier in the article, the 2019 mobile ad spending is predicted to account for approximately half of the global advertising market.

While the rapid growth of the industry is exciting, it has not been easy for brands to get their mobile ad campaign to work as they want. Since the medium is fairly new, it is not always easy to determine the strategies and tactics that work the best.

A successful mobile advertising strategy varies from one business to the other. However, considering the general trends, the following are some key mobile ad strategies that have shown great results for various brands.

1. Incorporate modern versions of mobile ads

Mobile banner ads are the conventionally used ones by various global brands. While they still hold their popularity, it is time to think beyond banners. After all, “Banner ad blindness” is not an unknown term anymore!

Consumers have shorter attention spans and limited availability of time to view the ad content being thrown in their devices.

A CTR analysis given by COULL tells gives us the following figures in terms of “click through rates” for various ad formats:

While display advertisements like banner ads can be highly effective when directed to the right consumer groups at the right time, it is definitely time to include modern versions like native and video ads in your mobile ads spend.

2. Think Local

The share of local ad spend is projected to jump in the year 2020.

Ever wondered the reason behind the rapid growth?

Mobile ads are one of the best channels for businesses that are localized. With the possibilities of geotargeting, mobile ads are now being delivered to local consumers.

In some ways, it helps the user feel interested and connected to the advertisement. When a brand decides to create local mobile advertisements (both, platform-agnostic and device-specific), the results are often highly effective.

3. Make use of the targeting options

It is important to target your mobile ads to improve overall effectiveness.

As an ad creator or a mobile ad marketer, it is important to remember that modern-day consumers have a low tolerance for ads that do not serve value. Make use of the capabilities of current mobile devices (like GPS) to create more targeting options.

Targeting options like consumer demographics, time targeting, behavior targeting etc are very effective when you’re focused on improving your response rates. Ensure that you use as many of these targeting options available.

Modern options like micro-location targeting and micro time targeting are also being used by mobile advertisers to generate better and rapid results.

4. Use Google and Facebook as your starting point

With the availability of multiple channels, it is often an overwhelming decision to make a choice on the most suitable ones for your mobile ad spend.

Mobile Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook offer huge advantages. They allow you to manage multiple mobile ad offerings at the same place. The platforms have been expanding their mobile ad offerings in the last few years. Things like Facebook’s Audience Network and Google Mobile App can be considered.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that your mobile ad spend ends here. There are various other hubs that you must seriously consider as you grow in business and get a better understanding of the mobile advertising world.

5. Reduce your ad loading time

Even while fetching awesome conversions, mobile ads often end up being overlooked by user groups. In fact, certain studies report that a big percentage of mobile users prefer to block their mobile ads due to interruptions caused by the long loading time.

We’ve all faced it. Slow-loading ads that take forever to come through.

Not just are these ads blocked by user groups, they often end up creating a negative brand experience.

Ensure that you build lightweight ads to keep them user-friendly. If possible, do not include heavy images or hosted video content. Ad serving processes like “polite load” help by loading a lighter file while the main content gets uploaded.

Finally, try not to use incompatible technologies for ad serving.

– Remember, mobile ads need to meet certain pre-defined objectives. Ensure that your ads are as informative as possible. Adding phone numbers, email ids is a great way to do that. Consumers who like your add look for a quick way to get more information. Keep your “tap to call” button visible and attractive.

Other techniques like providing incentives through ads work great when you want to attract more users and generate leads. Everyone loves free stuff. A discount coupon, a gift card or any other incentive format are good ways to do so.

Mobile Advertising Costs

So, how do we get to decide a reasonable ad budget?

OR

How much does mobile advertising cost?

Determining the right spend is definitely not as simple as it sounds. According to a report by emarketer for mobile internet ad spending worldwide, it has grown from 19.20 billion dollars in 2013 to 195.55 billion dollars in 2019! That’s gigantic!

Cost per Click

Advertising networks usually ask advertisers to bid for their CPC. A smaller niche usually receives a higher price for a single click.

Cost per Action

Ad formats like banner ads or video ads do not really focus on clicks to get conversions. Sometimes, companies build their campaigns with objectives like “x” number of app installments, “x” number of sign-ups, etc. These is the CPA.

This mode of payment is also dependent on the niche and the quality of the ad created. CPA is the total ad campaign cost divided by the number of actions received.

Cost per mile OR Cost per thousand impressions

This type of payment mode allows to bid for impressions, so they pay for the number of users viewing the mobile ad, and not for the clicks or conversions.

Not all advertisements are focused on getting immediate conversions or actions. A mobile ad may sometimes solely target brand awareness. These are the instances where CPM or cost per mile modes work best.

Mobile advertising companies factor their costs vary based on the industry, ad delivery channel, targeted location, size of user group being targeted, mobile device (operating system) and other factors.

Following are some of the crucial data points for mobile advertising costs:

2017 global mobile advertising spend- 107$

2017- Google generates 32% of total US mobile ad revenue

Average CPC for the year 2016- $0.27 (ranging between $ 0.03 in Bulgaria to $0.51 in Denmark)

Examples of Companies with Successful Mobile Advertising Campaigns

According to IAB’S internet advertising revenue reports, mobile has grown to account for nearly two-thirds of digital ad revenue for the year 2018. Additionally, approximately 71% of the time spent online tends to be on a mobile device.

While the list of brands that have reaped the benefits of mobile advertising is endless, following are five top brands with highly successful mobile advertising campaigns:

Samsung: Samsungs interactive ads which included a personalized real-time battery identification mobile ad unit, when they first introduced Galaxy S6 was a huge success. It allowed viewers to experience the product before they could decide to purchase it. An interstitial ad was also created to demonstrate the smartphone’s fast charging feature. Since users were actually looking for this feature, the targeted mobile advertisements along with the catchy CTA button that led the users to experience the product created a greate demo ad.

Nissan: The video ad showcasing Nissan’s Rogue SUV was an instant hit. The ad featured a fight between the SUV and a gang of snowmen. Users could tap on their touchscreens to participate while learning about the features of the automobile.

Snickers: Remember how you wanted to grab that chocolate bar every time you heard their audio ad that said: “you’re not YOU when you’re hungry”? Snickers targeted a group of users who were actually listening to a different music genre that was not their usual choice. Just as they were disinterestedly doing that, the audio ad was delivered to pinpointed users who were then taken to Snickers branded playlist called “The Hunger List”.

Netflix: Yes, the world’s leading entertainment service provider created a realistic advertisement experience to capture the interest of the users. The ad used the fear experience that people had while watching their horror paranoia series called Black Mirror. User mobile screens changed to black which resembled a broken mirror. The ad grabbed immediate attention, to say the least!

Pond’s: The super interactive mobile advertisement created by Pond’s managed to grab high user engagement time. What did they do? They targeted a specific group of customers who spent a large percentage of their time on mobile phones and cameras.

The ad created a personalized event where the front-facing cameras of their smartphones were used. As the user looked into their device, the camera tracked facial features and detected acne-prone areas of the skin. Bang! Their new Acne treatment product was a hit.

Final words:

2020 is fast approaching.

You can no longer solely rely on the quality of your products to win over new customers. Customer experience is important too. With the growth of mobile advertising, business owners need to now focus on mobile customer experience.

Mobile advertising is the future of the advertising industry. It is the quickest way to reach the Gen Z audience to sell your brand or product. With news of 5G being introduced to the markets soon, the internet speed will go zooming. Video ads, gamification and reality ads will get easier to deliver.

Finally, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are expected to play a significant role in the world of mobile advertising.

]]>https://www.mobileads.com/blog/mobile-advertising/feed0What is Media Buying & How to Make it Workhttps://www.mobileads.com/blog/media-buying
https://www.mobileads.com/blog/media-buying#respondTue, 25 Jun 2019 07:42:34 +0000https://www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=2367Does media buying sound complicated to you? If it does, I assure you it isn’t. In this article, we will learn what media buying is, and all the steps required to get started. What Is Media Buying? According to Investopedia, media buying is the purchase of advertising from a media company such as a television […]

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Does media buying sound complicated to you? If it does, I assure you it isn’t. In this article, we will learn what media buying is, and all the steps required to get started.

What Is Media Buying?

According to Investopedia, media buying is the purchase of advertising from a media company such as a television station, newspaper, magazine, blog or website. It also entails the negotiation for price and placement of ads, as well as research into the best new venues for ad placement.

It falls into the paid media category and generally means the acquisition of choice media space and time for displaying ad creatives.

The goal of media buying is to find the right place, time and context to deliver useful ads to your target market and in so doing increase conversion rates, sales or brand awareness.

Time plays a vital role in media buying. A buyer buys ad space for a specific time period.

Benefits Of Media Buying

The following are the benefits of working with media buying agencies.
You spend less on your media buys: You get better deals when you work with media agencies because of the media clout and relationship media agencies maintain with media owners they have worked with.
Expertise Gain: Media agencies are quite experienced in buying media. Their expertise includes clients’ budget optimization and media acquisition.
Efficiency: Media agencies have access to many tools that enable them to deliver more efficiently.

Who Is the Media Buyer?

Before we take a look at the media buying process, we first have to know who a media buyer is.
A media buyer is someone who deals with the acquisition of advertising space in print, outdoor, television and radio broadcasting, magazines, billboards and online outlets, such as websites. They usually work for an advertising agency.

How Digital Media Buying Works

Digital media buying is the process of buying placements for advertisements on websites, apps, and other digital platforms.

Advertisers usually use real-time bidding to purchase advertising space on publishers’ websites. Real-time bidding allows website owners to sell ad impressions (views) through an advertising platform. Each impression is sold as it becomes available, in real time.

The introduction of real-time bidding has completely changed the way publishers and advertisers buy and sell display advertising.

Components Of Real-Time Bidding

The following components make up real-time bidding:
The Advertiser who buys advertisement on a website.
The Demand Side Platform is a tool that handles the purchasing of online advertisement on behalf of advertisers.
The Ad Exchange is the marketplace that connects advertisers and publishers. The ad exchange facilitates the purchase of display ads in real time through auctions.
The Supply Side Platform helps publishers to better manage and sell their ad inventory.
The Publisher is the owner of the website advertisement is sold on.
How Real-Time Bidding Works
The real-time bidding process kicks off when an internet user visits a website. When that happens, the publisher’s site sends a message to the supply-side platform informing it of the availability of an impression.

The supply-side platform then analyzes the information sent about the user and sends it to the ad exchange. The following information about the users are generally analyzed by the supply-side platform before been sent to the ad exchange:
Their location
Their web history
If available, their age, gender, and any such information

Immediately the ad exchange receives this information, it connects to the demand side platform and transmits information about the user. With this information, the ad exchange starts an auction, and the demand side platform starts bidding on the view based on what the view is worth to them.

The advertiser who bids the highest wins the auction, and the bid is sent back to the publisher and the advertisers’ ad is displayed to the user.

The whole process is repeated over again for every available view on a web page, every time a user visits a new page on the website or a different website.

Programmatic Advertising

According to Statistic, “Programmatic advertising is a term used in digital marketing that describes the fast-growing computer-based automated buying, selling, placement, and optimization of digital advertising. In contrast with traditional advertising, programmatic ad buying involves the use of non-human software machines to purchase digital ads. Programmatic advertising technology ensures efficiency and reduced advertising cost. “

In the United States, programmatic advertising accounts for over 75 percent of total digital ad expenditures. Display programmatic advertising spending in the country is projected to reach over 45 million U.S. dollars by the end of 2019 compared to the 2016 spending cost of 25.5 million U.S. dollars.

It’s estimated that more than 80% of digital display ad dollars in the United States today is done via programmatic advertising means. Also, more than 80% of mobile display and video ad dollars also already flow through programmatic channels.

eMarketer estimates that by 2020, the vast majority of United States digital display ad spend (86.3%) will transact programmatically.

Programmatic marketing enables us to target different segments of our audience which can encompass demographics ranging from age, gender, social standing, average income, and location.

Buying Digital Media

Media buying generally means purchasing ad space from offline and also online channel, but in this article, we will focus more on online media buying.
In paid media, you purchase ad space in order to achieve your business objectives. There are many paid media available to buy from including television, social media platforms to digital advertising banners platforms
Owned media is media platforms owned by your brand. These are channels through which brands communicate with their viewers, users or subscribers. Your brand has exclusive access to publish on these channels.
Earned media refers to the recognition you get in specific verticals after a job well done.
The Media Buying Process
The media buying process ensures that the right people see your ads. It involves acquiring desirable ad space(s) and time slots so you are able to reach your target market via various media channels such as newspapers, television slots, magazines, radio, and online ads.

How Does The Media Buying Process Work?

There are 3 phases in the media buying process:
Pre-Launch: In this phase, the media buyer analyzes relevant media decisions.
Launch: In this phase, the buyer ensures effective media delivery. He makes sure the campaign is executed as per the media plan.
Post-Launch: In this phase, the buyer tends to analyze the result of the campaign and make adjustments as per needed.

Phase One: Pre-Launch

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” Before you get started on your media buy campaign, it is essential to have a plan.

Failure to plan will result in your time and money been wasted. Planning your media buy saves you time and money in the long run.

It would help if you did your groundwork before getting started. Do the following steps before you buy your first ( or next) media.

Identify Your Target Audience

Before you buy media, you need to know who your audience is. Failure to research your audience will result in you making wrong media buying decisions. It would help if you create a persona of your target audience before buying media.

Ask yourself the following questions to know who your target audience is
Whom do you want to reach?
Whom are you targeting?
What’s their gender?
How old are they?
Where do they live?
Where do they work?
What’s their average income?
What’s their marital status?
The answers you get from these questions will help you identify the best platforms to place ads.

Research Your Target Market

Now that you know your target market, it’s time to do in-depth market research. You can do your research, or you can depend on secondary research that’s done for you already. From our experience, It’s more cost effective to use secondary research.

In this phase of research, you want to identify the platforms your users make use of. Are they online? Are they watching television? Or are they into print media? In this phase of research, you are trying to determine the best places to place your advertisement.

It is important to note the consumer behavior of your target market. This helps in placing ads that perform effectively and achieves the campaign objectives.

Research Your Competitor

Once you’ve identified and researched your target audience, the next step is to research your competitor. You want to know how your competitor advertises to your target audience.

Ask the following questions to get a better understanding of what your competitors do when buying media.
Whom are your competitors targeting?
How are your competitors buying media?
What platforms are your competitors using to run their campaigns?
Where are your competitors placing their ads?
Which media channel have your competitors deemed effective or ineffective? Do they believe it’s less effective running television or print ads compared to running digital ads?
The answers you get from these questions will help you reverse engineer what your competitors do when buying media.

Create a Media Buying Strategy

Choose how you will run your media buying campaign. Decide on the channels that would enable you to achieve your campaign goals.

Based on the decision you make, you will either run your campaign on a single channel or multiple channels be it print ads in newspapers and magazines; video commercials on TV, online and movie theaters; indoor posters and outdoor billboards; radio advertising; banner and text digital media; mobile advertising and so on.

Set Your Marketing Objectives

Jawaharlal Nehru rightly said, “Failure comes when we forget our ideals, objectives, and principles.” Setting your marketing objectives helps you focus on the right advertising platform that can deliver your end goal.

It would help if you determine what you want to achieve from your media buys. Are you trying to create awareness about your business? Is your goal to have more sign-up or sales?

For each media buy, identify your most important objectives so that you can ascertain whether or not those objectives can be achieved.

Negotiate Price

Whichever media channel you decide to use to run your campaign, it’s important to negotiate the price of the media beforehand. Look for the best deals, and ask for discounts or bonuses that may be available. You should always compare offers from multiple publishers, and don’t be afraid to negotiate price.

Here are some tips for negotiating media buys:
Go for win-win when negotiating with media owners
Create long-lasting partnership with media owners
Get ideas from your media partners when buying media
Plan for the future – don’t burn the bridges when negotiating. Don’t go for a cutthroat bargain that will make future negotiations impossible
Give media owners a second chance – If a media you bought isn’t performing, don’t cancel it immediately. Talk to the media owner and look for ways to optimize the performance

Set Your Marketing Budget

To run a successful media buying campaign, you need to budget wisely to achieve the campaign objectives. Spend your budget where you will get the most ROI.

Budgeting effectively will allow you to determine the most appropriate method to achieve your goals, according to the cash you have to spend.

Phase Two: Campaign Launch

During the launch phase, the primary responsibility of the media buyer is to ensure optimal delivery of the media. It is also important to continually monitor the performance of the campaign.

It’s crucial for the media buyer to analyze what works and what doesn’t and based on those insights, make further adjustments.

Ensure Media Delivery

Ensure your advertisement is appearing in the desired location and is being shown to the right people and in the right context. Where and who your advertisement is shown to determines how it performs. Monitor how your potential customers interact with your advertisement – are they interacting with the advertisement the way you want them to? Are they commenting on your ads instead of sharing it or do they start performing your desired action and stops before completing it?

Track And Tweek

Things don’t always go the as we want them to. At such times, you have to make adjustments to what doesn’t work. Sometimes potential customers don’t interact with the advertisement the way you want them to, and you don’t receive the desired response (clicks, buys, signs up, calls, and so on).
Always track your campaigns and make the required adjustment to get them working the way you want. Don’t be afraid of drastically changing your campaign.

Phase Three: Post Launch

The post-campaign stage is a time to reflect and think about the good, the bad and the ugly of the advertising campaign in terms of delivery, media space, return on investment, customer engagement and overall performance.

Analyze Campaign Performance

After running the campaign for some time, and you have collected as much data as you can, analyze your campaign to see how it’s performing.
Analyze the effectiveness of the media space and whether it’s generating revenues as expected.
This is the time for you to evaluate the return on investment, and decide if the campaign should be canceled or continued. This is also the time to see what you did wrong in the campaign so as to correct it.

Media buying is no easy task. It’s a time-consuming task that shouldn’t be rushed. Do your research, plan your campaign and when you are certain, then buy your media.

]]>https://www.mobileads.com/blog/media-buying/feed0What is OTT (Over-the-Top) Advertising?https://www.mobileads.com/blog/ott-advertising-over-the-top
https://www.mobileads.com/blog/ott-advertising-over-the-top#respondTue, 09 Apr 2019 05:12:53 +0000https://www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=2346The era of cable television is slowly coming to an end. They are slowly losing their market to streaming media in terms of reach and convenience. Video views on over-the-top (OTT) gadgets grew by 51.7 % in 2018, and the number is expected to continue raising. Subsequently, traditional TV ads can offer a piece of […]

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The era of cable television is slowly coming to an end. They are slowly losing their market to streaming media in terms of reach and convenience. Video views on over-the-top (OTT) gadgets grew by 51.7 % in 2018, and the number is expected to continue raising.

Subsequently, traditional TV ads can offer a piece of their original content. Streaming is the new style of watching TV. OTT advertising may be the death of TV commercials.

What is OTT Advertising?

The term OTT is used in relation to any gadget or service used in streamlining digital content to a TV or similar device. Here is a list of common devices;

Game consoles

Smart TV (in-TV apps like HBO Go and Netflix)

Streaming Boxes (Samsung Allshare Cast, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV).

Internet-enabled smart blue-ray/DVD players

HDMI sticks (Amazon Fire TV Stick, Chromecast, Roku).

OTT Advertising is similar to traditional TV; the only difference is that it is streamed to the media through OTT platforms. This technology is expected to make a big difference for marketers in both worlds in 2019 – the advantages of programmatic, and the growing reach of streaming services.

Ad revenue is expected to shoot to 60% from 45% over the next 10 years, with OTT. Early adopters of OTT advertising and AdTech pioneer are looking at impressive returns in the future.

Will there be Ads on Netflix?

Premium subscriptions such as Netflix are likely to continue being ad-free. OTT Advertising will be common in free-to-watch platforms like The Young Turks, Cheddar, Newsy and Crackle.

For individuals interested in Netflix-like content (documentaries, movies, and series) there are other choices such as Roku and Tubi.TV, among other country-customized platforms. The platforms offer free to watch Hollywood content (ad-supported) for their subscribers.

The growth and success of OTT advertising were recently reported after Hulu earned more than $1 billion from ads for its first time, and Roku’s business doubled last year.

There are very many companies currently competing for advertising opportunities. The competition is speculated to get stiffer with years with the growth of technology.

This strategy will allow producers of OTT platforms to serve their non-paying audience. By leveraging their advertising power, they can reduce the cost of their devices and keep a number of their contents free.

Why is OTT Popular and What Are Its Benefits?

Large Reach

A few years ago, OTT could not have boasted of a large reach as one of its strengths. However, it has developed over the years, and it is speculated to have 197.7 million monthly OTT users by 2022 in the US, with the number being 170.1 million in 2018. With the current data, it has more users than other platforms.

Strong Targeting

This is among the greatest strengths of OTT. As an investor, you can select the topics, geographic areas and demographics to advertise your products. This is not achievable in traditional TV, so it is definitely an upgrade. Reaching the correct audience leverages your advert. It increases the efficiency of your advert and saves resources that would have otherwise been used advertising for the wrong market.

A lady shopping for shoes after seeing an advert

Powerful Analytics

It is vital that you understand the performance and validity of the advertisement you are using to reach out to your clients. Many OTT platforms provide data analysis for their products. At the bottom are OTT Platforms that only give information on data and impressions. Most OTT platforms offer different types of data and can subdivide the information by placement or targeting.

Flexible Budgeting

When running any type of business; your greatest goal is to minimize the expenses and maximize the output. OTT ability to track the number of views and targeting makes budgeting flexible. That is, a limited number of impressions can be bought for a specific audience to maximize efficiency and minimize costs.

High-quality Creative

Lastly, it is possible to create quality videos to use on the OTT platforms. The latter is designed to stream quality content to viewers. Businesses can take advantage of this to deliver high-quality videos and deep messages that may not be otherwise easily conveyed to the audience.

OTT is the Only Reasonable Alternative for Traditional TV Commercials

It is right to say that the shift from traditional TV has not been bad so far. The cable TV audiences are now referred to as cord shavers, nevers, or cord cutters.

Nevers. These are people who have no interest in the medium. This group has never paid for premium channels or TV Subscriptions. However, at one point they will access media through various streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go or Amazon Prime.

Cord shavers. This group regularly pays for TV subscriptions, but for some reason, they have decided to cut down on their plans. Despite keeping some of their TV channels; they are constantly checking out streaming services.

Cord Cutters. As the name suggests, this group have completely cut down their subscriptions and may have shifted to streaming services.

The only way advertisers will recover their lost revenue and reach out to all these groups is through OTT advertising.

A study by Pew Research Center showed that 61% of Americans aged between 18 and 29, access TV through streaming services; only 31% use cable services. A small 5% watch TV through a digital antenna. The statistics for ages 50-64 on the same are; 10%, 70% and 15% correspondingly.

How Are OTT Ads Delivered?

Delivery of OTT is determined by how the platform communicates with OTT devices – for example through Video Player-Ad Interface Definition (VPAID) tag or Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) – and the ad-insertion method. They can be served as Client-side ad insertion (CSAI) or server side (SSAI). (PS: All these terms are explained after this section).

This is the general order of content delivery from OTT;

The target audience is created. The audience is created based on the user’s subscription data. Sometimes, they could be enhanced with some household info. This could include first, and third-party data, which is inclusive of specific shows watched on the platform and the preferred categories.

Campaign pushing. Audience matching begins. The audience is then matched to certain TV’s subscriber lists on different OTT platforms. The ads are then pushed, downloaded, and protected by the OTT gadgets.

Ads Display on OTT Platforms. At this juncture, OTT gadgets are connected with VAST or VPAID tags depending on the platform.

Reporting. After the campaign, the OTT operator sends ad-exposure results and produces the reports for the advertiser. Basically, the campaigns are improved with first and third party data entry.

OTT Ad-Insertion Methods

Client-side ad insertion (CSAI)

Client-side ad insertion (CSAI) is the traditional method, where ads are directly loaded to the OTT box before displaying them to viewers. CSAI does not provide an effective way to display ads to the audience, and it is a bit vulnerable to hackers. However, it still has the lead position in the OTT gadgets within the advertising industry.

SSAI and Stitching

Unlike CSAI, SSAI ads are served as a smooth stream. This process creates (in real time) a mix of ads and the core content streamed to the customer’s gadget frame-by-frame. Since ad blockers have no way of discerning which frames are or not ads, SSAI is considered the most effective way of dealing with ad-blocking soft wares.

SSAI allows a perfectly smooth experience for live feeds too. It “stitches” the content with ads eliminating the annoying pauses between ads and actual videos. If view-ability measurements and clickable ads are necessary, (through the support of VPAID tags); the abilities can be later added on the client’s side. This will require an additional advanced development on the OTT producer’s side.

Stitching is a step ahead from a viewers end, but it imposes a certain limitation on the advertiser’s side.

Tags Used for Communicating With OTT Devices

VAST Tags

VAST Tags addresses the player on how to go about the ad – how will it show up? Can they skip it? How long will it be displayed? Where is the ad located (ad server information) etc.

VPAID Tags

Video Player-Ad Interface Definition (VPAID) tags are an upgrade of VAST tags; they make the ads interactive and adds viewability measurements. This explains why most companies are choosing VPAID tags over VAST tags.

Challenges of OTT Advertising

As explained in the previous paragraphs, OTT advertising has loads of advantages over traditional TV advertising. However, they are still have a few technology hitches that need to be fixed to name OTT as the king of advertisement officially;

At the moment most of the OTT and smart TV inventory available programmatically can only be found in the OTT or smart TV manufacturers.

Right now, there is no support for measurement and third-party ad serving.

OTT is still very fragmented. As a result, it lacks guidelines and industry-wide standards.

OTT still lacks some capabilities that the web has. It lacks flash and cookies support, which limits the advertiser from targeting viewers properly and attribute conversations.

Also, some tags from other platforms may be incompatible with OTT platforms due to its closed nature; resulting in measurement discrepancies.

VPAID is an improvement of VAST. It was created to facilitate rich ad experiences, e.g., interactive media ads. However, due to the nature of OTT, it is impossible to implement executable ad units.

Ad servers and the device’s communication is limited to VAST advertising tags, designed by IAB for regulation of serving video ads.

Final Thoughts

As a business person, you want to stay abreast with the changes around the world. The advertisement department is currently going under a serious revolution that has significantly changed the business world. OTT advertisement is slowly taking over the traditional TV advertisement. By 2022, the OTT platforms are speculated to have accrued a total of 197.7 million monthly subscribers. Besides the large audience, OTT platforms have other advantages like;

Powerful analytics

Strong Targeting

Flexible Budgeting

High-quality Creative

There are still a few lapses that need to be addressed on the OTT platforms, but there is no doubt it is the next big thing!

]]>https://www.mobileads.com/blog/ott-advertising-over-the-top/feed0What is Programmatic Advertising and How Does it Work?https://www.mobileads.com/blog/programmatic-advertising
https://www.mobileads.com/blog/programmatic-advertising#respondWed, 13 Feb 2019 11:14:59 +0000https://www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=1969Programmatic advertising, also known as programmatic display advertising, is an automatic process of buying and selling ad inventory. Ad inventory is an online space available for advertisements on digital media. Before advertising was programmatic, it was done manually. In purchasing manual orders, advertisers were in contact with a sales team for: Requesting for proposals: It […]

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Programmatic advertising, also known as programmatic display advertising, is an automatic process of buying and selling ad inventory. Ad inventory is an online space available for advertisements on digital media. Before advertising was programmatic, it was done manually.

In purchasing manual orders, advertisers were in contact with a sales team for:

Requesting for proposals: It is a document that solicits proposal in procurement of online ad space

Bidding: It is an offering of certain price at an auction

Quotation: It is an estimated price deal for displaying online ad

Human negotiation: It is discussion regarding sale and purchase of online ad space aimed at reaching an agreement

However, with programmatic advertising, a software is used for purchasing digital advertising. Programmatic then allows for preparing insertion order (IO) or an ad tag, with the help of the software.

IO, or an insertion order, is a written authorization to publish/display an ad. Generally, it includes,

info regarding date of insertion

number of insertions in a specific period

ad format and size

ad placement, that at the header, side, bottom or over the content

In practical terms, it is a purchase order. It is issued through an ad agency or a media representative.

This prior to programmatic was a labor-intensive task. Nevertheless, the new system can efficiently take care of routine tasks like:

Distributing insertion orders to publishers

Tracking and record keeping of ad tags

However, humans will sit back and reflect on:

Optimizing customized and sophisticated campaigns

Planning strategies for scaling

How does programmatic advertising work?

Once an ad is bought with programmatic advertising then the algorithms evaluate user analytics, on the following basis:

Behavior

Engagement level

Social engagement

Location

Time per visit

This data helps the system to determine what ad content is relevant to a particular user. Accordingly, ad is displayed as an impression on the page. The aim of the ad is to attract user to click on it.

For instance, a user is scanning some blog related to “baby food”. The ad tech system evaluates the user and displays an ad related to “offers on baby food item” or “baby food pouches”.

Thus, by targeting ad to specific user, programmatic advertising can increase efficiency of an ad campaign.

Programmatic vs. Real Time Bidding (RTB)

There is a huge difference between programmatic and real time bidding (RTB). RTB as the name suggests is a process that allows ad space to be bought and sold on per-impression basis. It one of the several ways for purchasing space in an online world.

SSP: Sellers and media owners who have inventories to sell use supply-side platform or SSP

Ad exchange: Ad exchange sits between the two – DSP and SSP. Buyers bid for available inventory that matches the criterion in their DSP. Bid with the highest price win and thus the ad is served.

Programmatic advertising is a technology that enables advertisers to automatically target audience. The audience is ‘selected’ because of certain metrics that are obtained through algorithms.

It is not necessary that advertisers who employ programmatic make use of RTB to purchase. They can buy inventory space in “traditional way” but utilizing programmatic technology. This process has been termed as Programmatic Direct.

What is programmatic direct?

Programmatic direct utilizes one-to-one interaction, that is, between advertiser and publisher. It is very much like the conventional buying of ad inventory. However, software is added into the system.

In here, terms and conditions of media-campaign is previously decided by the advertiser and publisher. Finally, AdTech platform is used for automating the delivery and tracking of the campaigns.

What is programmatic TV advertising?

As the name suggests, programmatic TV advertising is technology enabled data-driven method of buying and delivering ads against TV content.

Television media alone is a huge market. In 2018, $84 billion was the TV ads spend in the US. Television ad business on “connected TV” is running programmatic ads.

By “connected TV” we mean, watching TV content over internet.

Consumers are consuming content at their own leisure and choice of device. Netflix and Amazon are giving direct-to-consumer services. This has drastically changed the consumer expectations around ads. Eventually, this could pose a threat to traditional ad-break model.

Hence, advertisers have started targeting ads through programmatic TV advertising.

Although, programmatic TV advertising is still in its infancy but it is growing steadily. Currently, 44% advertisers are doing programmatic TV.

What is programmatic native advertising?

Native programmatic advertising is native advertising but with a technology backup, that enables advertisers to make native ads even more relevant.

Native advertising means, ads within a content. They look like part of the editorial flow. Generally, they are placed on social media feeds or are under ‘recommended’ section.

Native ads are super compelling, specially the pictorial part, hence, people tend to click on it easily. As per statistics, spending on native advertising in the United States was $21 billion in 2018.

These ads give good result cross mobile devices. As per BI Intelligence, native ads will account for 63% of mobile ad revenue by 2020, up from 53% in 2016.

Currently, advertisers are leveraging on three different types of video ads. They are:

Instream video ads: They are delivered ‘before’ or ‘in-between’ video content. With an enabled “skip” option, they usually consume 15 to 30 seconds.

Outstream video ads: They do not require video players to run. They are positioned inside article content. They appear somewhere in the page break of an article.

In-banner video ads: These ads are displayed in an ad format, which means, they are integrated with video. In-banner video ads are quite popular specially on 970×250 video billboards. Billboard is one of the most prominent and most visible placements within the publisher’s page.

Demand for programmatic video advertising is going up. According to statistics, by 2019, 77% of all US digital video ad dollars will move programmatically.

Why use programmatic advertising?

Programmatic is an efficient way for running advertising campaign. Here are some pointers that prove it is the future of digital ad buying.

Next-gen ad system: Relying on algorithms for determining ad spends and getting full- fledged tracking report with deep insights for every impression is a winning game for advertisers.

Overall efficiency: It is one of the most optimal ways of running every campaign. Programmatic helps in sending right message, at the right time with the right format. Thus, the technology helps in using the budget in the most efficient manner.

Some free time: Once the tags are entered into the system, advertiser needs to sit back and track each campaign. Simultaneously, he may think of launching new campaigns and ways to expand it.

It is beyond human limitation, to dig deep into every rows and columns of data to get into the countless data points. This kind of rendering is only possible through high-level processing done by algorithms.

Technology behind programmatic advertising comes in as a very handy tool as it can easily crunch through such information.

For instance, if an advertiser wants to run localized aggressive campaign, an automated system can handle that for you. You just have to select the parameters, like:

Age

Gender

Income

Location (in this case, it will be local)

Only small, well-defined subset of the market will see the ad.

Wider audience pool: Programmatic accesses digital properties cross screens. It not only caters to web media houses but in gaming apps as well. Thus, you can target ads to wider audience pool.

In touch with customer’s journey: Programmatic enables you to target audience through multiple digital devices.

Brands can reach their consumers:

while their they accessing their laptop or desktop and

When they switch to their tab or mobile device

Since, programmatic does not allow the ad to lose track cross devices. This gives an upper edge to an advertiser to reach to its audience more discreetly.

Programmatic Advertising: The Takeaway

Faster reporting times and endless data is only the tip of iceberg when dealing with programmatic advertising. Technology cross internet is moving very fast. Time is right to adopt it at the earliest else we might leave the most important information, that is, our customers data on the table.

Let’s take a peek into the current statistics, after all, the numbers speak for themselves.

]]>https://www.mobileads.com/blog/programmatic-advertising/feed0What Is a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) and How Does It Work?https://www.mobileads.com/blog/what-is-a-demand-side-platform-dsp
https://www.mobileads.com/blog/what-is-a-demand-side-platform-dsp#commentsFri, 08 Feb 2019 03:39:59 +0000https://www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=1324In the past, digital ads were bought and sold in a manual manner by real people; publishers and ad buyers. This method of buying digital ads was not only expensive and unreliable, but in some cases, advertisers were not able to buy enough ad inventories for specific ad campaigns. DSPs were made to make the […]

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In the past, digital ads were bought and sold in a manual manner by real people; publishers and ad buyers. This method of buying digital ads was not only expensive and unreliable, but in some cases, advertisers were not able to buy enough ad inventories for specific ad campaigns.

DSPs were made to make the buying and selling of ads inventories cheaper and more reliable, by programmatic bidding.

What is A Demand-Side Platform (DSP)?

A demand-side platform (DSP) is a system for advertisers to purchase and manage ad inventories from multiple ad sources through a single interface. This is normally done using intelligent software which bids on the inventories using an auction process. This makes the buying and selling of ads cheaper and more reliable.

This whole setup is termed as “programmatic advertising” and the bidding process by which ad placements are auctioned within micro-seconds is called “real-time bidding (RTB)”.

Today, the term ‘buying’ has now been replaced by the term ‘demand.’ On the other hand, publishers and media owners are now considered as a ‘supply-side.’

Thus, we have the DSP (Demand-side platform), which are used by advertisers to buy ad inventories and the SSP (Supply-side platform), used by publishers and media owners to sell their available ad inventories.

How a Demand-Side Platform works

How Does a DSP Work?

The way a DSP works is highly technical, however in simple words, a DSP connects to ad inventory supply sources, where tons of publishers have made their supplies available. This allows advertisers to buy ad inventory placements across a multitude of publisher’s websites and mobile apps based on impressions.

The new generation DSPs these days do not only connect to ad exchanges and ad networks as in the case of the old, but they offer cross-channel media buying too. Some of the new platforms that can be bought into using a DSP are:

OTT/CTV

direct publishers (web and in-app)

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

Google keyword search

ad inventories from China (Baidu, Wechat, Alibaba, etc)

Using these new gen demand-side platforms, media buyers are able to run end-to-end ad campaigns from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel. This includes targeting audiences from the awareness, to interest, then to consideration and right down to the conversion phase of the funnel.

For example, a media buyer can identify someone doing a Google search for, “cheap hotels in New York”, then when she fires up Facebook, will be shown New York hotel ads on her FB timeline. Taking the campaign further, the person will also see similar ads whenever she consumes content on a website or even playing a game on an app.

Previously, media buyers had to manage multiple ad campaigns from various sources like Google, social media such as Facebook, Twitter and control them in different dashboards. However, now things are different.

New-gen DSPs are able to consolidate campaigns from different channels into a single user interface. Media buyers can now set-up, optimize, analyze and get insights of campaigns from different channels, in a single DSP platform.

Costs and Pricing

Ads in DSPs are sold on a few ways, depending on which DSP you work with. Generally, if the DSP is specifically built for performance campaigns such as app-installs, then the fee is based on CPI (Cost per Install). Most performance-based platforms use these:

CPI (Cost Per Install)

CPC (Cost Per Click) ~ mostly for driving traffic to landing pages

CPA/CPL (Cost Per Action / Cost Per Lead) ~ This is mostly for lead generation campaigns

CPV (Cost per View) ~ This is mostly for video advertising campaigns

However, the majority of programmatic ads are sold using the CPM (Cost Per Mille or Cost Per 1,000 Views). The CPM model is good for awareness ad campaigns.

Some performance marketers will arbitrage CPM rates by buying in CPM-based DSPs and earning their fees in CPA or CPL payouts. For example, a performance marketer earning $5 per install marketing for an app publisher may pay only $2 for 1,000 impressions($2 per CPM). However, the 1,000 impressions that he pays $2 for can convert into 1 app install that has a payout of $5/install. This will nett him $3 for every $2 he spends on media buying. Obviously he can scale up his ad budget to earn even more money from the campaign.

Prices of ad impressions in DSPs are determined by a real-time bidding (RTB) process, that takes place within milliseconds, as a user loads a web page or interacts with an app.

Different from the traditional ways of buying media, with a DSP, there is no longer a need for a human to negotiate prices with the publishers, as all of this is done automatically or “programmatically”. The ad impressions will simply be won by the highest bidder.

What’s the Difference Between Ad Networks & DSPs?

Ad networks allow advertisers to buy ad inventory in bulk rather than one impression at a time. Put simply, ad networks gather ad inventories from various publishers, grouping them up and then selling them as slices to advertisers. However, not all ad networks support Real-Time Bidding (RTB).

DSPs are unique as they offer the same capabilities as what ad networks used to provide, with an addition to a suite of audience targeting options. The advantage of DSPs over ad networks is that they provide advertisers with the ability to do real-time bidding on ads, serve ads to a multitude of platforms, track and optimize – all under a single interface.

Some targeting options offered by a DSP include:

Geo-targeting

Demographic targeting

Keyword targeting

Contextual targeting

Device targeting

Re-targeting

and more.

DSPs are also used for retargeting campaigns. This is possible because they are able to manage large volumes of ad inventories and recognize ad requests with an ideal target audience, targeted by the advertiser.

Self-Serve VS Full-Serviced DSPs

There are two types of DSPs that you need to be aware of. Some DSPs offer a self-serve platform, which is an excellent way to manage your ad campaigns. Then there are managed or full-serviced DSPs, which can be a costly option.

The advantage to using a self-serve DSP is its lower cost entry. You don’t have to commit a large upfront advertising budget to get started. That said, you have to be responsible for the targeting, bidding, budgeting and optimizing of your ad campaign. Some advertisers prefer using a self-serve DSP because they prefer to manage their campaign in their own way.

Full-serviced DSPs on the other hand provides you with account managers that will dedicate their time to manage your campaign. With a full-serviced DSP, you will rely on the account manager towards the success of your campaign, from planning, budget distribution and choosing targeting options.

A full-serve DSP is usually more expensive as you’ll have to commit towards a minimum ad budget per campaign. Choosing to go for a full-serviced DSP means you lose some control of your campaigns. However, there are also advertisers who prefer this option because they do not want to dwell in any technical work.

What Is A DMP?

A data management platform (DMP) is a platform that stores audience data, usually coming from multiple sources. It allows advertisers to create target audiences for their campaign based on 1st party and 3rd party audience data.

A DMP acts as a single platform that consolidates online and offline data from various advertisers, creating demographics, behavioral and affinity segments which are then used as targeting options in digital advertising. Performance data from live campaigns are then fed back into the DMP, improving the accuracy of the data.

Most DSPs usually integrate with a DMP to provide advertisers with super sharp audience targeting options. You’ll find the options to use a DMP within a self-serve DSP interface.

DMPs are becoming increasingly important for advertisers, as it allows advertisers to reach their specific target markets while reducing wastage in advertising.

List of Demand Side Platforms (DSP)

Every DSP have different features and capabilities. For example, different targeting options and inventories for different traffic like desktop and mobile. Most DSPs work with dynamic bids based on maximum CPM, set by the advertiser.

]]>A VAST tag is essentially a third-party ad tag generated by an ad server, except that it’s for video ads.

VAST stands for Video Ad Serving Template. It enables video players to sync with ad servers, thus as an advertiser, you can serve ads into multiple ad inventories within video ad players. Put simply, it enables your video ads to appear correctly on video players, across different publishers and ad networks.

As an advertiser, you don’t have to build your own ad server. Simply pick a reliable third-party video ad server that supports VAST. A good video ad server should also have detailed reporting, auditing & split-testing tools.

Difference Between VAST XML and VAST URL

VAST tag come in 2 formats, the VAST URL and VAST XML. Knowing which one to generate for depends on the DSP you are using – some DSPs only accept VAST URL tags.

The VAST XML format is preferable if your DSP support both formats.

Once you know which VAST format to use in your DSP, let’s look at using MobileAds’ VAST XML generator to create VAST tags:

How To Use MobileAds’ VAST Tag Generator

Upon logging into the dashboard, simply click on ‘Upload Ad’ and choose to create a video ad.

Next, upload your video ad in mp4 format. Make sure to put in your landing page URL, so users can click through your video ad and land on a designated landing page.

A video ad is usually 15-seconds and maximum 30-seconds long. Once you upload your ad, simply give your video ad a name and save it into a campaign. You can add more video ads to the same campaign for A/B testing purposes.

It’ll take a few minutes for the video conversion to be ready. Once done, simply turn your ads to active and use the VAST ad tag generator to get an ad tag for the DSP or traffic source you’re planning to run your ads in.

That’s it. Copy the ad tag and use it in a DSP (Demand-Side Platform), where audience targeting is done.

As your campaign runs, you can track detailed video ad metrics from within the MobileAds reporting dashboard.

]]>Wherever you go, your mobile device follows. Inevitably, mobile has become so ingrained in our lifestyle than any other medias.

As reported in Mary Meeker’s report mid of this year,

29% Of people’s daily screen time are spent looking at smartphones

Global mobile data traffic grew nearly 70%

Mobile commands 24% of media time spent in the US

Mobile media time spent is higher at 51% compared to desktop in the US

Consequently, mobile display advertising is significant for brands and advertisers (when it is done right). So, it’s expected for many to wonder: What are the best mobile ad formats for my marketing campaigns?

Let’s face it. There’s no such thing as a universal ad format. So instead, let’s look at the available types of ads for mobile—traditional and trending. Understand how each works. Learn how to select the best mobile ad format to monetize your mobile marketing campaign.

Interstitial Ads

Samples of mobile interstitial ads: (1) video interstitial (or videostitial) best for branding, (2) with image hotspots to show product info when tapped, and (3) with image slider enable users to compare effects of the featured product

Interstitial ads are visuals that cover the entire mobile screen at the size of 320 x 480 pixels. This is the most popular size as it allows for more context, clearer call-to-action, and more creative content like videos, store locator, and many others. This allows you to encourage more engagement hence lifting your SAR for better brand performance and recall.

Here are the interstitial sizes available but not limited to the following.

It usually, appears at crucial moments during navigation, like the opening, browsing between pages, or in between games. It requires user action; typically click a button to close the ad or swipe to navigate to the desired content.

Interstitials are adopted straight from the web that fits perfectly on mobile. Its ability to grab a user’s undivided attention; especially fullscreen on mobile is incredibly appealing to advertisers. You don’t have to worry about mistaken click-throughs, as it only appears in between pages while an app is in use.

Advertisers can create beautiful and engaging content with high-quality artwork and compelling copy. This can reduce the disruption factor for users.

According to many experts, interstitial ads are best placed within games with levels. The natural break in gameplay between levels allows interstitials to appear unobtrusively. It is advised not to interrupt user experience. So, publishers should not push an interstitial ad in the middle of a game.

Interstitials’ performance has been reportedly good. InMobi’s interstitials have a 2-3x higher click-through rates compared to banner ads. On overall ad spending for interstitial is high. According to AppFlood, interstitial mobile ads accounted for 70% of mobile ad revenue globally in Q1 2014.

Pros

Larger space

Broader message, exposure and memorization rate

Visually compelling

High impressions

High conversions

Can offer animated and interactive rich media content

Cons

Can be highly intrusive—in the event of bad placement

High CTR may result from the difficulty to close the interstitial

Requires more design work and thought on proper placement

Video Ads

In-App video advertising has been steadily gaining traction. As mobile becomes the dominant ad channels, advertisers are devoting their ad spends on video. According to VentureBeat, mobile video ad spending triples in 2015, where global ad spend on video rise to 71 percent of total mobile ad spend in Q3. The expanse of video ads reach on mobile is mind-blowing. The engagement rate is high. This makes them suitable for advertising games and well-established brands.

A typical video ad runs 15- or 30-second when user tap to play. While some advertisers invest in higher budget video ads that play automatically when in view. Video on mobile is pretty appealing. Unlike desktops, users are focused on video ads whenever they are engaged with the device. They don’t get to multitask around a video ad.

However, advertisers must be careful as it may backfire. A poorly made ad or placed inappropriately will frustrate users and cause them to close the app. So it’s important that video ads should be short (as mentioned in 15 to 30 seconds range). And, as we’ve said with previous formats, ad placements must be at a natural break in users’ app journey.

Brand advertisers should ensure that there’s an enticing screen grab to encourage users to play the video. They should think creatively when introducing a video to the users. Given its natural tendency to disrupt the user experience, advertisers should consider only reveal the video after a banner is clicked. Also, to minimize the risk of frustrating the users, autoplay video should be fired without audio and allow users the option to turn it on or off.

You cannot force viewership—if one has seen it before, chances are they wouldn’t want to watch it again. However, if your ad is fantastic, you might get more viewings. So best to allow users to share that video and hope for viral social shares.

Expandable Ads

Sample mobile expandable ad with a combination of rich media like video, photo gallery, and social feeds.

The expandable ad is a type of rich media ad, but can be seen as a combination of banner and interstitial ads. It typically starts with a 320×50 pixels banner (teaser banner) and increases in size usually at 320×480 pixels following a tap. The expanded ad offers a large area for advertisers to deliver the intended advertising message. It is less intrusive as the expansion appears right on the app itself, rather than bringing users to a landing page.

Here are other expandable ad sizes you can explore.

Expandable ads are a high-impact marketing strategy that helps to overcome banner blindness. Some advertising experts advised limiting the frequency of expandable ads on a website. Their rationale was that most visitors would likely tolerate occasional expanding ads that disrupt their experience. Also, if they encounter this constantly, it may get them frustrated.

However, on mobile apps, expandable gives different ad experience. Users are more likely to accept a full screen expanded ad on their app than being led to a website. Where it will disrupt the activities on the app itself. As rich media ads are designed to catch the eye and engage this may also pose an extremely intrusive threat. Therefore, it is imperative that the creative must not go overboard.

You may think that implementing high impact ad units may seem like an enormous task. But, it’s quite straightforward. Many ad platforms accept expandable ad units as third party tags. Meaning the process of implementing this is substantially similar to other banner ads. As explained in our previous article on HTML5 ads, you’ll just need to get reliable vendors to do the rendering during ad serving.

Standard Banner Ads

The 320 x 50 or 300×50 pixels banner ads; static or animated, usually clutter the top or bottom of the screen. It is the most popular advertising format to date. Before, these ads produced mostly ineffective, accidental clicks. Now, it can be rather effective if implemented in the proper context. It is passive, non-intrusive and does not interrupt the user experience.

Unfortunately, this also makes it easily fall into “banner blindness” (a syndrome where users developed an unconscious resistance to the banner).

The success of banner ads pretty much depends on brand recognition. Big brands can leverage its minimal space without the need for additional information as they are known. Unlike emerging brands, they need to stuff additional information into the tiny space, which ended up with cluttered content.

Banner ads are versatile and simple. You can quickly produce and deploy. However, this doesn’t make up for its terrible effectiveness and low CTRs. It generates the least earnings among all ad types. But, it’s not all doom and gloom. It can still be effective, sometimes, during the engagement phase when users are active within the app and fully attentive.

According to various experts, banner design needs a careful balance with subtle eye-catching content yet not too distracting from the app experience. Advertisers should highlight key features or offerings with a clear, concise call to action. Avoid bright colors, too much text or mediocre graphics.

Some interesting findings by InMobi are that on Android, banner ads delivered the best conversions for lifestyle content (2.02%); on iOS, banner ads worked best for classified content (2.7%).

Pros

Available on all screens

Can be executed in large volumes

Cheapest format

Very quick to deploy

Easy to integrate

Cons

Limited space

Quickly fall into the “banner blindness” syndrome

Despite fighting the lack of space and users’ “banner blindness” syndrome with an animated content display. It is still not as efficient as its other counterparts (as you will see more below).

Native Ads

Source: Mobyaffiliates, Sample of native ads that have the same look and feel like the app itself.

Native ads come in various forms and sizes. It combines advertising message with user-centric content. Meaning instead of giving publishers the ad, they will be given the components of the ad. It is up to them to display the element in ways that fit well with its app. So, the ad will appear as a part of the app’s content—thus the name, “native”.

It is similar to banner ads, but they don’t take up a particular screen space or the full display. Users can still browse the content while viewing the ad, but because of it’s “native” look and feel, it’s less of an eyesore and non-disruptive. Your ads will appear contextually appropriate. Thus, making native mobile advertising highly effective. For instance, an ad for cosmetics placed in the middle of a makeup tutorial article in a blog reader app.

Many people deem that native ad format is by far the best mobile ad format. This is so because native ad leverages the context and relevance of the content on which it appears. Users treat the ads as a new content in their information flow. It makes much more sense for them too. These contribute to them being more likely to click on the ads.

That’s why the CTR is splendid with static content. For example, native advertising on Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, or Instagram Ads. The targeting possibilities for these platforms are extremely accurate. It enables advertisers or brands to find the right people for your product or service.

Heineken Light reached 54% of audiences — 35 million people — in just three days using video ads on Facebook. (Source: Facebook)

32% of consumers said they would share a native ad with friends and family, versus 19% for banner ads. (Source: ShareThrough)

Pros

Less intrusive than other formats

Higher click-through rate (10.6%)

Better ad engagement rate (14.0%)

Improved user experience

Cons

Require more work to adapt the advertising on myriads of possibilities—due to its flexible format

How to Choose a Mobile Ad Format

There’s no rule of thumb when it comes to choosing the right ad format for your mobile campaign. To find the ad format that works best for you, you’ll have to experiment. With the myriad of ad formats and rich media components, there is room for loads of creativity.

However, you’ve got to start somewhere. So perhaps the following few questions will help you in identifying a proper ad format for your mobile marketing campaign.

What are your campaign goal and monetization objectives?

Who is your target audience?

Are you looking for pure user experience (UX)? Or to balance UX with revenue?

Do you want less invasive ads?

Are you looking to run performance or branding campaign?

What inventory and platform are you targeting?

Conclusion

We are bound to see more creativity and innovation in mobile advertising. There will be new formats emerging as the industry evolves. Currently, video ads and interstitials for mobile look promising (data wise). However, given that we are all trying to reach varied audiences, it’s important to think about what works best with the user’s experience. Start from there and experiment with various mobile ad formats. Continually gather data and analyze your results. Then, tinker with effective mixes of ad format, placement, and frequency for your mobile campaigns.

Essentially, what’s more important is to work with the right partner who can help you optimize the ad content that works for your target consumers. This will help you get better response rate from your users.

For brands, the best practice is to provide a good experience with the ad, either through interactions, giving useful information, entertaining or generate a positive feeling. This will engage users and deliver a strong impact on brand recall, which increases brand affinity.

]]>https://www.mobileads.com/blog/best-mobile-ad-formats-sizes-display-ad-campaigns/feed2What is VAST & VPAID and Why is it Important for Video Advertisinghttps://www.mobileads.com/blog/vast-vpaid-why-is-it-important-for-video-advertising
Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:00:46 +0000https://www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=863We’ve all heard of VAST ad and VPAID, and how important adopting these standards are. What is a VAST ad or VAST tag? What is the difference between VAST and VPAID? And how it affects your ad operations? If you want to run video ads, it is important for you to understand the basics. It is […]

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We’ve all heard of VAST ad and VPAID, and how important adopting these standards are.

What is a VAST ad or VAST tag? What is the difference between VAST and VPAID? And how it affects your ad operations?

If you want to run video ads, it is important for you to understand the basics.

It is palpable that video is an effective advertising medium. For the past few years, video consumption is ascending quickly. Also, many advertisers and marketers have joined the bandwagon, with more expecting to adopt video marketing soon.

And on top of normal video ads, it’s reported that interactive video ads drive more brand awareness & engagement.

A set of standardized code (based on VAST guidelines) that is placed on publisher’s site or in-app that communicates with the ad server.

It tells the server what type of ad to be displayed based on targeting criteria.

Each ad space will need a new ad tag.

Here’s a diagram to further illustrate the above.

Think of IAB VAST as scripts that give consistent instructions to the viewers’ video players on how to handle an ad. It tells the player

which ad to play,

how the ad should show up,

how long it should last, and

whether the viewers can skip it

where to find the ad (the ad server)

what the click-through URL should be

and more

VAST tag comes in many versions. Despite the release of VAST 3.0, while VAST 4.0 is under drafting and yet to be officially released by IAB, most publishers are still on VAST 2.0. However, VAST tag is backward compatible, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues.

One critical update on VAST 4.0 is that it addresses viewable impressions, where it standardizes the viewability tracking.

Why is VAST ad important? It’s important because it enables video players and ad servers to speak the same language.

With regulation, advertisers don’t have to worry about their video ads not able to run on many players. And publishers don’t have to worry about limited inventories.

In other words, it means more volume for publishers to sell and more ad serving impressions for advertisers, which brings in more revenue. Standards lead to scale, which benefits both publishers and advertisers.

So, as an advertiser, you should go for standard-based video ads for better campaign results.

VPAID or “Video Player-Ad Interface Definition”

Developed by IAB for interactions between ad units and video player focused on enabling rich interactive in-stream ad experience.

Enables interactivity and measuring of how well your video ad does through engagement tracking.

Codes that runs within video players and spruce up your ad with interactive features like overlays for views to click and read more, and many others.

Advertisers love ads that trigger response from the target audience and you can measure the video ads you put out there.

It enables you to know if your video ad is performing.

Here’s an illustration of video ad flows with VPAID.

Why is it important for advertisers?VPAID is important because it means you can see how individual ads are performing and devise improved ways of engaging your audiences and increasing the level of interaction with your ad.

An example of a VPAID enabled interaction would be that a user could click on an ad to view more detailed content such as a longer version of a pre-roll.

You can choose to set what time and where the ad appears within the content, with the basic functions of play, pause, close or hide, and more. Whatever action the user takes will be recorded and reported back to the advertiser.

How to optimize for maximum results? Today, most digital video placements are loaded and managed using VPAID. But, this makes it difficult to support server-side ad insertion.

Instead of VAST ad tag, many agencies merely insist on VPAID as it enables viewability, verification, and interactivity. Many agencies and advertisers also merely focused on interactivity and highly engaging ads by incorporating VPAID and MRAID for video mobile advertising.

You should also know that VPAID ads that are delivered via VAST tags are regularly referred to as VPAID tags.

So as an agency or advertiser, why should you care about this?

To get optimum results from your video ad: On top of the ad unit’s performance, you need to ensure ad serving is optimized for maximum results too. Hence, VPAID should be sent to the video player in a VAST ad response, to take care of maximizing potential video ad insertion on publishers’ side.

Why VPAID/VAST Ad is Big

The goal of these standards is to allow complete interoperability between all advanced video ads, ad networks and serving technology and players. This is to ensure that any VPAID/VAST compliant ad could be delivered through any VPAID/VAST compliant ad network/server to any VPAID/VAST compatible video player.

Two things have to be standardized to enable smooth interoperability of advanced video ads across different players environment.

The ad server response should be understood by compliant players—this is covered by the VAST standard

The advanced ad requires a standard player run-time expressed as a standard API—covered by VPAID

Here’s a diagram to show the relationships between the standards in a typical ad serving process.

In other words, with most video players adopting IAB VAST “language”, operations can quickly drop the ad into the ad server. And any video players will be able to read and display the ad correctly because they understand the “VAST language”.

As long as the video player knows how to read VAST it will be able to show the ad. It doesn’t matter where your video ads are being served.

Moreover, you can run any third party video player ads with VAST tag because the video player will be able to understand and display it.

How it Benefits Ad Ops

You will be able to plug this ad into your ad server and it will just work (as long as you and your rich media vendor follow the baseline VAST format)

You save time in the scheduling of your video ads into non-conforming video player

You don’t have to spend time and resources on training, developing, and managing custom video ads for ad networks/servers/third-party

Streamline your operations through simplification of your ad delivery

Allow you to serve ads from other providers without overhauling your video player

Video player developers will not waste time on customize development of the player for each and every new ad network or third-party

Video Ad Server – What To Look Out For?

First, consider the loading speed of the ad server. Video ads are heavy and will require more bandwidth to load quickly. To combat this, good video ad servers usually have adaptive video streaming function that automatically delivers the video ad to the user in the most usable quality, depending on their internet connection quality.

Second, see if the video ad server offers detailed tracking. As you run video ad campaigns, there are numerous tracking metrics that you need to track and understand in order to make meaningful ad optimization. Some of these tracking metrics include video play rate, video percentile play, drop-off rate, ad viewability and dwell rate.

Lastly, look for a video a server that is simple to understand and has a support team that is able to help you when else fails. Ad servers, in general, are built to take away the complexity of ad servers, so you the advertiser can focus on managing and optimizing your ads.

Summary

Video advertising is a diverse and expanding area for online marketing. In order to be able to make valid and useful suggestions for your client, you need to know both the capabilities and the limitations of video advertising.

By being familiar with VPAID and VAST, you will know what the ads can do and where they can be placed so that they are as interactive as possible and able to be quickly distributed around the Internet.

Few things you need to know. You need to know that there are many types of video ads available. You need to know what they can and cannot do for the most part and how these video ad formats interact with the video content and the video player.

For an ad to be completely VPAID/VAST compliant it needs to interface with everything as outlined in the standard-setting document.

If you are going to start creating video ads that are non-linear or interactive, you should take a quick read through the IAB standard document.

]]>Mobile Rich Media Ads: 16 Examples that will impress your audience (Part 1)https://www.mobileads.com/blog/mobile-rich-media-ads-examples-impress-audience-part-1
Fri, 13 Jul 2018 07:00:20 +0000//www.mobileads.com/blog/?p=173Mobile rich media ads are no stranger to digital advertising today. There are many innovative ways for you to impress your audience, make them remember you and compel to be your loyal brand advocates. In this article, we will share with you 16 exciting mobile rich media ads examples. We hope you’ll get inspired to […]

Standard Banner Ads vs. Rich Media Banner Ads

Standard banners are simple GIF, JPEG or FLASH image formats. They usually include texts with visuals such as a 2D logo.

Rich media banners are those ads with audio/video components in it, making them a lot more versatile than a still image.

Small in file size, which is useful for branding purposes.

Huge in file size, but makes up for with its versatility.

Less or almost no interactivity. In short, static.

Highly interactive. In short, dynamic.

No other technology can be used with standard banners.

Rich media banner can be synchronised with technologies like JavaScript & HTML.

They have only one interaction point; to be clicked.

They can have many different interactions.

Mobile rich media banners are amazing because of all the cool stuff we are about to show you. They are used customarily in rich media ad campaigns today. These examples are sure to inspire great ideas in you.

There are many solutions to host your videos. Nonetheless, Youtube will be your best option to get your videos hosted and serve as an ad because you don’t have to pay for the bandwidth.

Apparently, when you read texts, you only remember 10% of it but, you will remember 95% of the video. Sounds crazy, but wait until you hear that around 52% of consumers are more confident to make online purchases after watching video ads.

Even an astonishing 59% of senior executives prefer to watch a video about something than to listen or read texts.

Although video ads are the way to high engagement, we cannot expect users to view ads like movies. With consideration of the attention span of media consumers today, the ideal video length is within 30 seconds to 1 minute. Any longer than that, you will risk losing your prospects to the headlines of another article or the button of a game somewhere else. You may consider making videos that are non-skippable. It’s a good tactic to make them stay after capturing their attention. Here are some substantial reasons telling us why that’s a good trick.

Image credit: joopcrijk.com

Video advertising works best when your audience feels involved in the content, and that is best done through comedic, educational and inspirational themes.

Animated explainer videos are one of the best approaches, as they’re known to improve conversion rates by a whopping 20%!

And at the end of every YouTube video, you can add in a limited time Call-to-Action that encourages quick decision making from the viewers.

Plus, video ads can be played on almost any devices. And you don’t have to pay premium prices for their services. It is free!

So say your goodbyes to all the animated GIF images, because YouTube’s certainly one of the most engaging features to have, and it’s not going to burn a big hole in your pocket.

This gladly leaves you with the budget to spend more on other ad features, like the next example.

2. More images for interactivity with Image Gallery

With the image gallery feature, you can have multiple images within a single ad. It’s the best feature to give more variety and prolonged engagement with just visuals alone.

Think of it as a mini slideshow within an ad. And the best part is, they have hyperlink capabilities. When users click on those images within an ad, it can transfer them to your designated landing pages. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

So if you are running a retail store or a restaurant, your best bet is to showcase all the best merchandises or promotional set meals as a series of images. This will allow your audience to browse through, giving them an engaging experience alongside multiple choices.

A great ad feature to offer multiple choices, which also increases the time spent on your ad.

Here’s another feature that captures the users’ attention.

3. Increase audience engagement with Facebook components

Everybody is on Facebook and they check their account frequently! This makes it the best social leveraging point to improve brand awareness and create a more personable audience engagement.

Facebook page ads take advantage of high social visibility and peer recommendations. And that increases engagement on your ad. More benefits of having a Facebook page for business use here.

This feature is so important now when back then deep linking was the only way to improve one’s social media presence. Users will be redirected to a mobile web browser and are forced to log in to Facebook before being able to “like” or “share” something. It just pushes people away.

You never have to worry about that with Facebook as a rich media feature for your banner ads. Users can do all the “likes”, “comments” and “shares” within the ad itself, without needing to log in or out. Now, that’s huge!

You can advise your potential customers to the nearest outlet with the get location feature. It’s done by detecting user’s IP address and a few different servers to locate the user’s current location and how far they are from your outlets.

Think of this ad feature as a mini GPS within your ad, once your users have made up their mind to make a physical purchase.

6. Allow customers to contact you easily with Click-to-Call

This is a very useful feature. When your users need additional information instantly, lead capture enquiry will be too simple while store locator won’t help at all.

Imagine that you run a gym training centre, with rich media banner ads promoting your business. Perhaps the users are interested in trying out your gym, but they lack sufficient information to make a confirmed decision. Plus, they only have a few minutes before they need to continue with work. Time is of the essence, so what’s the best way to reduce that waiting time to zero?

Say hello to the Click-to-Call feature. Allowing users to directly contact you through a phone call. It gives users the confidence to take action immediately to the benefit of your ad campaigns. It’s also a very convenient for those who are always in a hurry and on the move.

How the feature works is by accessing your phone’s dialer. And from there, calls can be made. These can be counted as successful ad conversions if done right. It’s that simple and straightforward.

7. Enhance user experience with 360 Product Viewer

Static images lose out due to non-interactivity, but this can be overcome with a 360-degree viewing.

More and more brands are adopting this component. Here’s one, a global car automaker utilizing this feature to great effect.

If your targeted audience wants more product information and details, but texts seem tedious or impossible on mobile ads, visual images appear to be the option. However, static images may seem boring (and risk losing their attention), 360-viewing is the answer.

This feature allows for a product image to be viewed from any angle within the 360 limit, and you can’t call this a 3D feature because the products involved looks so real it’s like actually watching a real item than a computer generated one.

It may be quite a feat to pull something like this back then. However, today, a 360-degree viewing feature is getting easier to implement. And it’s all thanks to the combination of video and digital components.

It all started off with the simple video recording of a product item rotating in a full 360 rotation before that video file is converted into an image file that can be automatically or manually rotated as such.

8. Paradigm-shifting ad experience with Gyroscope

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Have you ever wondered when you tilt your smartphones or tablets the screens or the objects inside adjust accordingly? It’s gyroscope technology. Typically, gyroscope technology is more popular for games, allowing you to control movement in your game by moving your device.

However, it has gradually gyrated into the advertising world and here’s an example of gyroscope ad for your reference.

Aside from the usual notifications from apps that show up on screens, users tend to tap usually on them in response. With gyroscope technology, users now can perform movements such as a “shake” to respond or a “tilt” to change the view. It’s not just convenient without the need for fingers tapping; it also engages users with high interactivity.

As the tech is evolving, shakes and tilts are not the only possibilities. Innovative concepts like ad units with 3D panoramic viewing products and interaction changes based on body movement are already made possible. This tech appears to usually work wonders with other features like 360-degree viewing.